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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

(www.tbray.org)
175 points Bogdanp | 2 comments | 31 Oct 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tptacek ◴[31 Oct 25 21:53 UTC] No.45777117[source]▶
Why give it oxygen?
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meowface ◴[31 Oct 25 21:59 UTC] No.45777160[source]▶
To play devil's advocate: Grok has historically actually been one of the biggest debunkers of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories on Twitter, contrary to popular conception. Elon keeps trying to tweak its system prompt to make it less effective at that, but Grokipedia was worth an initial look from me out of curiosity. It took me 10 seconds to realize it was ideologically-motivated garbage and significantly more right-biased than Wikipedia is left-biased.

(Unfortunately, Reply-Grok may have been successfully partially lobotomized for the long term, now. At the time of writing, if you ask grok.com about the 2020 election it says Biden won and Trump's fraud claims are not substantiated and have no merit. If you @grok in a tweet it now says Trump's claims of fraud have significant merit, when previously it did not. Over the past few days I've seen it place way too much charity in right-wing framings in other instances, as well.)

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pstuart ◴[31 Oct 25 22:08 UTC] No.45777225[source]▶
The problem of debunking right-wing misinformation is that it doesn't seem to matter. The consumers of that misinformation want it and those of us who think it's bad for society already know that its garbage.

It feels like we've reached Peak Stupidity but it's clear it can (and likely will) get much worse with AI videos.

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billy99k[dead post] ◴[31 Oct 25 22:11 UTC] No.45777259[source]▶
[flagged]
the_gastropod ◴[31 Oct 25 22:26 UTC] No.45777367[source]▶
Please. What common conspiracy theories that have actual political impact have water carried by left-wing politicians?

Here's a short list of RW conspiracy theories with real life political consequences:

- Antivax conspiracies

- Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States ("birther" conspiracy)

- Biden / Ukraine conspiracy theory

- The litany of Covid-19 conspiracy theories

- The "deep state" conspiracy theory

- Sarah Palin's "death panels" conspiracy theory

- Sandy Hook was fake

- 2020 Election Fraud

- Trump / Ukraine conspiracy theory

- QAnon

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1. johncolanduoni ◴[31 Oct 25 22:41 UTC] No.45777501{3}[source]▶
I won’t go to bat for anything near a full equivocation in contemporary politics, but it’s worth remembering antivax was heavily left-coded prior to Covid. I don’t think approximately anyone has actually good epistemology - just biases that fluctuate in how much they affect the real world. Left wing academics and outlets carrying water for people like Pol Pot in the late 20th century because they liked the idea of communism was a particularly bad one.
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2. meowface ◴[31 Oct 25 23:21 UTC] No.45777801[source]▶
Even before COVID things were shifting - the antivax part of the left at that time were mostly only sort of aesthetically on the left. I think this Twitter exchange sums up my feelings about that counterargument: https://i.imgur.com/gNXJ6Wl.jpeg

Also, I think it's important to separate "left of center" and "leftist". Liberals and leftists are very different. "Progressive left-liberals" are fans of democracy and freedom and don't like bigotry and authoritarianism and Trump. "Leftists" are often fans of Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot and killing groups of people who aren't ideologically aligned and instating one-party dictatorships and violently suppressing dissent. In leftist parlance, "leftist" = "Marxist" while "liberal" = "capitalist belonging to the moderate wing of fascism". In the US, politics is best described as not two but four factions: leftists, liberals, rightists, and neo-Nazis. Often neo-Nazis will form coalitions with the rightists to help achieve major goals; historically leftists would form coalitions with the liberals, but this seems to be occurring less and less.

Although leftists will insist the notion is absurd and anti-intellectual, horseshoe theory contains a lot of truth in it.